Take Care of your Neurome
What is a Neurome?
It’s you own smart tech. It’s wet tech and health tech. It sits inside you.
It has hundreds of billions of neurons, each of which has about 10,ooo connections to its neighbouring neurons, and modulates billions of molecules. Your neurome sends trillions and trillions of pulses all the time.
It has its own editor: consciousness, an emergent curator that is sometimes around to keep an eye on things, but not often.
Consciousness is very small by contrast with the neurome. And yet it is capable of small infinities of its own, bookended by sleep, and more widely by a mysterious beginning and end it knows nothing much about.
Your neurome has its own detector, your body, plugged into the external world, feeding signals back and forth, electrochemically.
Throughout its life, your neurome constantly reshapes itself to the steams of data coming in through your body. It has deep learning, machine learning, video analytics, plenty of interesting internal AI’s (our other selves that emerge in context, the beach you, the pub you, the relationship you, the work you, even, for many of you, a specific phone voice, distinctively different to your normal voice).
It probably has millions of other learning types that the editors have not yet labelled.
It is a self authoring complex system, and you can access bits of it with your consciousness, but most of you are not brave enough to try, most of the time, preferring to look out, rather than to look in.
But it needs your care.
This world amongst worlds that exists inside your skull has a bit of hard tech to protect it from many physical knocks.
However, it is completely exposed to the data streams that happen to be in its environment and as it always responds, is shaping itself to those streams all the time.
It sifts them for patterns, it tries to make meaning. It’s nervous of threats and can easily be triggered into an alarm state, some times the runaway alarm state of panic, during which it will literally pour out hormones to try to control the various bits of its detection system.
These hormones exist in a constant delicate feedback balance, because they are the way it uses to tell what’s going on, and also the way it uses to make action happen. So things can go wrong.
They are also key to the reshaping process, which is about memory. The more hormones are involved in a reaction to information, the more the neurome is reshaped to recall that for next time.
All of this is unconscious. Well that’s not strictly true, some of it is semi-conscious and it can be conscious. All the bits are connected so you can work them various ways.
What I mean is that we might (without external stimulus) think something and the neurome will receive that thought as part of its data stream. Then all sorts of mayhem may get kicked off between complete melt down panic and more pleasure than you can handle in a day.
That’s the semi-conscious version, where you are aware of the thought and then aware of the how it made you feel, and somewhat aware of what you did, but not much else.
The fully conscious version is about using your editor intentionally to learn how to protect and grow your own neurome, to monitor and develop its health.
I think that’s enough for now. Something for you to think about and practice with. Talk to me if you wish to.
